Many people interact with several different electronic devices during their daily lives. At their homes, people may operate a wide variety of personal computing devices (e.g. desktops, laptops, set-top devices, gaming devices, etc.) to perform a variety of daily activities (e.g. shopping, communications, social media, research, gaming, etc.). Similarly, people may operate additional computing devices at their place of employment to perform their work-related activities (e.g. desktops, servers, laptops, notebook computers, etc.). And while commuting between home and work, they may operate still other electronic devices, including a variety of mobile devices (e.g. cellular phones, personal data assistants, vehicle-based devices, etc.).
It may be desirable to identify a person using a device (or associate a profile with the person) for various reasons. For example, providers of personalized services or products may desire to know the identity (or profile) of a potential consumer that is using an electronic device in order to provide appropriately personalized services or products. More specifically, in recent years, mobile devices have become increasingly popular for targeted content delivery, such as advertising. To get a comprehensive behavioral picture of a potential customer across multiple devices for targeting, it is necessary to link the user identifiers on these devices together. However, linking user identifiers on mobile devices to the identifiers on other devices (e.g. personal computers (PCs), laptops, etc.) is a challenge, especially in the context of different device ecosystems.
Devices within a particular device ecosystem may be designed to work well with each other, and may provide improved commonality such as common applications, and employing similar user interfaces. Currently, however, there are no existing identifier sync services to map identifiers between different device ecosystems.